The invention relates to a method and a facility for transporting similar items, in particular bulk postal consignments.
EP 741374 B1 describes a method by means of which a consignor can dispatch a batch of postal consignments via a transporter. The consignor adds an encrypted franking stamp (“encrypted indicia”) to each postal consignment of the batch and posts the batch together with a description (“mail documentation file”) of the batch, preferably in electronic form. This description contains an indicator code for the total weight of the batch. The transporter checks this indicator code.
This method is adapted in EP 741375 B1. The description that is sent (“statement of mailing”) is equipped with a digital signature. The arrival of the description in a “transaction processing center” initiates a money transfer which pays for the transport.
In DE 102005040664 A1 several batches of mail items are sent to a postal sorting machine. Every batch consists of similar advertising mail items. From every batch ten exemplary images of mail items from the batch are taken. Using these ten images, a representative image of the batch is generated by means of averaging the ten images, e.g. To process a mail item, its current image is compared with the respective representative image of every batch.
EP 1622065 A1 and AU 2005203141 A1 propose automatically identifying groups of similar postal consignments among all the postal consignments that are processed in a system. For this, the sorting system generates an image of each postal consignment to be processed and compares these images with each other.
The method described in EP 1232024 B1 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,826,446 B1 presupposes that each postal consignment is equipped with a machine-readable code, e.g., a bar code.
In the case of the method disclosed in WO 2006100357 A1, each postal consignment passes through a sorting system twice. An image of the surface of the postal consignment is generated as part of both passes. In the second pass, each generated image of a postal consignment is individually compared with the images that were generated and temporarily stored as part of the first pass.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,768,810 B2 describes a method for funding areas with delivery information on the surfaces of mail items. A digital image of the surface of every mail item is created. This image comprehends the delivery information. The digital image is transmitted to an optical character recognition (OCR) unit for automatically processing it. If it is not possible to identify the entire area with the delivery information, the entire image is sent to a unit for video coding.